Writing a Book is Like...

Writing a book is a lonely endeavor. You sit in front of a computer terminal (or blank sheet of favor, whatever is easiest on your hands or creative muse) for hours on end, listening to the voices in your head and watching words dance across the page. Sometimes they dance to the tune you play for them and sometimes they resolutely perform the waltz when you are clearly playing a polka.

You can tell how lonely it gets sometimes just from the fact that I'm anthropomorphizing letters. I'm truly turning into my son who drives the "L" as a truck and brings the "B" to eat breakfast.

What interests me is how different the portrait of writing and academic life is in fiction than in real life. In the book I'm currently reading as an antidote to constantly thinking about Harry Partch, writing flows as quickly as thinking and much more eloquently, research yields new surprises and enlightening discoveries with each new document, and people around the world are interested in mundane topics and stake their lives upon them. Life as a professor is full of adulation from students and long chats in large, well-appointed offices. Universities are havens of learning and of knowledge where students diligently hunker over books in the library waiting for the day when they will be allowed to write on their chosen subjects.

Of course, it is almost exactly like this in my life.

In reality, most letters and documents are full of curious but ultimately useless information and an entire weekend in an archive can yield one piece of pertinent knowledge. When you tell people what your book's subject is they politely nod and go home to tell their families "you'll never believe what this guy I met is writing a book on!" Writing is oftentimes a slog, and an uphill one at that.

So why do it? Why, at the end of the day, can I sometimes not tell you how many hours I've actually spent writing? It must be the thrill of discovery. The book I'm reading has one thing exactly right - when you find that piece of history that illuminates everything you've been examining the entire world lights up. When you fall into a flow in writing and look back in wonderment that the words on the page came from your hand, you feel a deep satisfaction. And when your family, like mine, supports what you do and is interested in your subject and progress, you realize that your book will find its niche and bring something new into many people's hearts and minds.

In other words, as lonely as it has been in some ways researching and writing for a month, it is worth the trouble for the conversation I'm starting both with people I don't even know and the people closest to me. It is a period of loneliness that quickly opens into a vast dialogue that continues for years and proceeds in twists and turns you cannot imagine. That is what ultimately makes writing worthwhile.